300, again
Unfortunately what I said wasn’t entirely accurate. To analyze my two predictions:
This looks like a special-effects funhouse.
This was true.
But moreso, it doesn’t look bad.
This was false. One for two.
I said it to friends after seeing the movie, coworkers later, and I’ll repeat it here. The movie just made me want to watch the trailer again. The trailer was better paced, edited, scored and more satisfying than the movie.
Excepting the fact that there was no historical truth to most of the movie, vis a vis an invading army with giant monsters, crazy malformed ghost warriors and clothed Spartans, one could almost enjoy the work as a pure action flic. (Gasp!)
Yet it failed most spectacularly as a pure action flic.
The pacing was extraordinarily dull. Each battle repeated the last and dragged on longer. Each battle was composed of “witty” quips, tedious ungore and farcical resolutions. Sometimes there was outstanding fight choreography. If that 45-second panning shot of Leonidas was actually a 45-second take (or longer), that was entirely too cool. Why not more of that?
There were completely unnecessary political scenes in Sparta which served no purpose other than to underscore the fact that action movies don’t ever need political scenes. Who needs faked sociopolitical emotion to enjoy 300 of Spartas fiercest warriors getting their asses kicked by the hordes of Persia?!
The movie was completely unremarkable musically. Completely forgettable. But the trailer? Just this morning a coworker was humming whichever Nine Inch Nails song that was. And again, the trailer came rushing back to memory and I wanted to watch it yet again. It actually had emotion.
The visuals had far too much potential. Why weren’t they turned to 11 in every scene? The entire film was shot on a sound stage, save a few minutes for whatever shit they decided they couldn’t do on a sound stage. (As an aside, really, which parts were those? Because I totally couldn’t tell.) The post-processing sepia-tone look of the movie was nice as an overall tint to the experience, but some scenes were absolutely wonderful in terms of special effects and then never touched again. Why not actually do something with the wall made of dead soldiers? Why not fight on and over and behind it? Why not underscore the importance of the act of creating a wall of dead enemies? If not for the idea but for the pure visceral nature of the fact that you and your enemy can bleed, but so can the very ground you fight on!
I wish 300 was cooler. I wish I could like it more, but it was a real let down.
(Also, I purposely didn’t touch any of the incredibly xenophobic undertones because, to be quite honest, I don’t think any of that consciously occurred to any of the creators. They were just ignorant. Doesn’t mean those undertones can’t be there, but I think that’s a red herring in the debate about the quality of 300.)